Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2002 13:14:07 -0800 From: Johnson David <djohnson@acuson.com> To: leegold <no_spam@worldpost.com>, freebsd-newbies@freebsd.org Subject: Re: arrgh squared [long] Message-ID: <20020211211418.D5B6737B405@hub.freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <000501c1b28b$fb806ae0$50cd7ad1@ljgms2k> References: <000501c1b28b$fb806ae0$50cd7ad1@ljgms2k>
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On Sunday 10 February 2002 03:37 pm, leegold wrote: > The question is: am I learning Unix? Is this hack, > and typing in cmds told to me, and the book buying, > ...am I learning Unix? Do I have to take a year of C, > then a course on Unix system internals, do I have to > do this to understand how to fix my X? I'm not going to answer the above question except to say that step-by-step howtos won't help you learn Unix, but they will get your X up and running so that you can stop banging on your system and start using it to learn Unix. Now I'm going to radically switch gears. As more and more people attempt to switch to FreeBSD (or another freenix) in an attempt to escape from Microsoft systems, frustrations like the above will become more common. These kinds of posts will become the mainstay of the list in a few short years. The reason is simple. Microsoft and FreeBSD (and their users) have completely different philosophies of operating systems. When all you know is one philosophy of computing, any deviance is viewed as stupidity, ignorance, and in some cases, heresy. The first major difference is the philosophy of the user. The basic philosophy of Microsoft is "the user is stupid so don't let the user do anything stupid". The basic philosophy of FreeBSD, on the other hand, is "the user knows what he is doing so let him do it." This is reflected in a lot of different things, so I'll remark on just one, the documentation. Microsoft documention is scanty and presented in a scripted step-by-step fashion. FreeBSD documentation is extensive and presented in a reference format. The second major difference is the philosophy of use. The basic philosophy of Microsoft is "one system one user." FreeBSD is much different and quite comfortable with multiple users per system. Even despite the "advances" of NT over DOS, the Microsoft viewpoint is still firmly centered in the concept of one user per system. Examples of this are numerous. When you combine the two differences above, you begin to understand the differences in how things are administered. For Win95/98, there simply is no concept of an adminstrator user, because there is only one user. WinNT/2K is more advanced because it at least recognizes the need for an administrator, file permissions, and the like. But even there an administrator isn't mandatory. Under FreeBSD the root account isn't even optional, and file permissions are integral to understanding how things work. The Win95/98 way works well for single user stand alone systems. The FreeBSD way works well for networks of workstations. > Would I be better off w/Debian? Hmmm, not really. It's still a Unix (or at least pretends to be a Unix), so you will be facing the same frustrations you have with FreeBSD. The advantage of Debian is that Linux has many more users, so you have many more sources of help. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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